My Mistake

A Memoir

Having spent his life editing others, perhaps it is no surprise that Daniel Menaker gets to the point quickly. In his memoir, "My Mistake," we learn all the really big stuff in the first few pages: that he will have a successful career as a writer and editor; that his only brother will die at 29 after surgery for an accident he, the author, caused; and, finally, that he will develop lung cancer, but be free of the disease - at least physically - by the time you read about it.

It is a striking beginning, however, given the almost microscopic detail of what follows, a coming-of-age story sprinkled with luck, ambition and pragmatism. The bulk is focused on Menaker's career, specifically his 26 years at the New Yorker and 15 subsequent years in publishing.

It has the feeling, at times, of a tell-all. Names are named. Quips are immaculately recalled decades later. And long-gone characters are brought to life - from the finicky and inimitable William Shawn, editor of the magazine from 1951 to 1987, to William Maxwell, a former fiction editor there, and a man so perceptive and generous in both word and deed that Menaker names his dog after him (in that good way).

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In this sense, the book is a literary history and an English major's dream. You learn some grammar and the office politics surrounding actual, physical offices. You find out that publishing playboy Jay McInerney started (and stunk) as a fact checker and that Alice Munro is just as lovely as you always imagined her. It is good, fun stuff, and yet early on, you can't help but feel something is slightly off - the scales uneven, the balance tipped.

You love Munro, you do, but what about that brother? What about the cancer? Menaker planted those seeds right away, after all, but seems to struggle to nurture them - to get to the heart of something real.

The beauty, you come to realize, is that Menaker senses this too - and eventually foregrounds this "emotional anarchy" in striking ways. Knowing well that people use language both to experience and escape life, he auto-corrects throughout, referring to his use of irony as an "addiction" and including edits from wife Katherine, who has something of Calvin Trillin's lovely Alice about her. After reading one of his stories, she gently suggests he go deeper. "The story is smart enough, but I don't know - you could make your writing more honest in its emotions." Point Katherine.

The problem, however, is not just artistic. In the end, what really matters? In publishing, this is no small question. As Menaker repeatedly notes, "three out of four (books) fail to earn back their advances" and even great writers fall prey to an editor's bad taste or just bad day. Readers can be equally lackluster. After publishing a piece on film and technology in Slate, he writes, "as usual in the world of minor culture commentary ... nothing happens."

As the book progresses, writing and publishing become metaphors for arbitrariness in life. "I begin to see that a vast ocean of chance has washed us all ashore here, with illusions of greater meaning and purpose and control over our lives than we have."

This unpredictability is all the more frightening because it permeates things both little and big, including, eventually, the seemingly innocuous football accident that led to his brother's death, and the white shadow on an X-ray, "about two and a half centimeters in width."

Before you emergency-call your shrink, it should be said: This is a very enjoyable book. In the vein of Joan Didion, Menaker's writing is wry, intelligent and self-aware, with just the right amount of funny thrown in. These "big ideas" are not beat into you, but delicately doled out in an engaging narrative about finding and using your true voice.

As the book ends - with some of the best writing this reviewer has read in ages - Menaker confronts his cancer directly. Yet while the disease creates an awareness for "how quickly we and what we do and say and whom we love all come and go," it also creates a newfound "appreciation of the quotidian," the random.

As he decides between radiation and more surgery, details from long ago pop up - and they seem to mean more this time: "Joe DiMaggio in center field, Roosevelt on the radio, Communists and Red-baiters, new forms of jazz, 'King Solomon's Mines' in movie theaters, frozen vegetables, pea shooters. That blond girl on top of me."

This is not to say the book comes with a red bow on top, wrapped up neat and tidy. A meditation on time, chance and meaning, it poses more questions than it answers, but that is what good literature does - at least when it manages to be published and truly move a reader, which, thankfully can just arbitrarily happen sometimes.